Agias Sofias str Design Competition

Agias Sofias, Thessaloníki, Greece

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Agias Sofias str Design Competition

Agias Sofias, Thessaloníki, Greece

Firm

Type

Landscape + Planning › Urban Green Space Masterplan

YEAR

2012

The design aim is to
create a metropolitan walkway, to integrate some of the most important
monuments of the city, and propose an iconic and eco-friendly landscape as an
entrance to the city center via the new subway station.A new shifting topography is proposed, a
porous surface which can address today’s challenges and at the same time is
flexible enough in order to adapt to future challenges. This new landscape does not rely on
strict social rules and boundaries, negating the plurality and variety of the
cityscape, but attempts to embody freedom of movement and expression as it
stresses its transformability, aiming towards spatial flow and interlacing. In this context the linearity of the axis as a concept, through the use
of dynamic forms and hard geometries, is discarded. Instead the proposed
topography initially shifts in order to reintegrate the existing 4th
to 7th century monuments in present’s day cityscape, redefining the
previously hard boundaries. At the
same time this flexible topography of multi- sized pores is distributed down
the axis in close relationship with the needs and characteristics of each
individual area that the axis consists of. Thus, a “soft” environment is created, offering a freedom of
movement and various stimuli in the process of understanding and appropriation
of the urban space. In this sense the pores are urban islands which act as
social attractors, inviting free use of their infrastructure for public and
commercial use.
Apart from serving their designated purpose, the pores contribute to the
sustainability of the proposal by creating green islands of flora and fauna and
by integrating solar panels on top of the iconic sun shelters, which cover for
most of the energy required for lighting throughout the axis during the night.